No justice for girl after lawsuit over mishandled rape case is dropped, lawyer says
A family was left disappointed after their lawsuit over a botched police case that they say allowed a child molester to attack and rape another girl was dismissed in North Texas court Tuesday.
The lawyer for the girl’s family said the judge’s dismissal of the suit denies the girl a chance for justice in “a vile attack” that almost killed her in 2014.
“The facts of the case are so heinous, what happened to this little girl. We feel she should have access to the courts and achieve some closure and justice on this issue,” Tahira Khan Merritt said. “The family is very disappointed.”
The girl, who is referred to in the lawsuit as H.P., was 11 years old when Clayton Fought kidnapped, raped, beat and left her for dead in Eastland the day before her 12th birthday.
However, Fought should never have been free to attack H.P. in the first place, but police allowed him to go free by mishandling a previous rape case against him, the family and Merritt argue.
The Star-Telegram is not identifying H.P. because she is a minor and a rape victim. Her family members are not being named in order to protect H.P.’s identity.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Abilene in January. On July 16, the judge granted a petition to dismiss the case. On Tuesday, the judge officially dismissed the lawsuit in the Abilene division of Northern District Texas court.
In May 2015, Fought was found guilty of attacking H.P. and two other girls. He pleaded guilty to four charges, including attempted murder and sexual assault, and was sentenced to 60 years in prison in H.P.’s case and 20 years in each of the other cases.
An ‘improperly handled’ case
In 2013, a father reported to police that Clayton Fought had sexually assaulted his two young daughters. The case was given to Sgt. Frank Saylors, who was the most experienced officer at the nine-person police department at the time.
Saylors interviewed the two girls, and the advocacy center they were staying at gave him a copy of the interview on DVD, according to an internal investigation of the case obtained by the Star-Telegram through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Saylors never questioned Fought and did not take an official statement from the girls’ father. He never submitted the case to the district attorney’s office for prosecution, according to the department’s internal investigation.
Eight months later, the DVD of the children’s interview from the child advocacy center was found buried in unrelated paperwork on Saylors’ desk.
The department conducted an internal investigation into the case, which they determined was “improperly handled,” according to Police Chief Bill Myrick’s report. Myrick said Saylors had “the primary responsibility for the failure” of the case, but the police department as a whole had also failed.
The investigation also found that Saylors repeatedly lied to Myrick about his work on the 2013 case and tried to pass the blame onto others in the department. Saylors was fired from the department on Jan. 16, 2014.
City Manager Ronald Duncan ordered Myrick to reorganize the entire police department and solve the “major problems that have been uncovered in the policies and procedures of the Eastland Police Department.”
“You, as our Police Chief, must immediately get your department under control,” he wrote in an employee counseling form to Myrick.
When asked by the Star-Telegram about the lawsuit being dropped, Saylors said he had not heard from his attorney yet that the lawsuit was dismissed, but said if it was, “that’s good — it shouldn’t have been done in the first place.”
Saylors said he would speak with his attorney before commenting further, but did not respond to repeated follow-up phone calls.
Changes made?
In an interview with KTAB news in 2014, Saylors said he had been scapegoated by the department and had done nothing wrong.
In 2015, Saylors won election as a city commissioner in Eastland. According to the city website, he is still serving as a commissioner.
Merritt, the family’s lawyer, said she has seen no evidence that significant changes have been made in the police department or city since H.P.’s attack, but she was hoping to delve into those questions during the discovery phase of the case.
She said she plans on asking the court to reconsider its decision.
“Our hope is that this never happens to any other child again, that sexual assault — especially in this day and age — is taken seriously by law enforcement and that proper investigation is done, so others won’t be hurt,” she said.
Eastland police officer Lt. Dan Wilson said the department has made numerous changes since the 2014 case, including implementing a completely new policy manual that was adopted from the Texas Police Chiefs Association. The department also has a new police chief.
Wilson said the changes were not just in policy, but were in “checks and balances that were put into place to make sure that no cases are sitting and not moving forward.”
